Desiderata (Excerpts).
Speak your truth quietly and clearly; and listen to others, even to the dull and the ignorant, they too have their story.
Many persons strive for high ideals, and everywhere life is full of heroism.
No less than the trees and the stars; you have a right to be here.
Keep peace in your soul. With all its sham, drudgery and broken dreams; it is still a beautiful world. Be cheerful.
--- Max Ehrmann, 1927

Saturday, October 2, 2010

Prescription for New Zealand

Kia-ora

A few ideas.

My answer would be to use Government finance within NZ to build up Kiwi bank until we have a banking system controlled by and for New Zealand. It is a good opportunity at the moment. The private finance sector has cocked it up so badly that there is a huge worldwide demand for Government bonds. They are perceived as one of the few safe-ish investments left.

Follow Singapore’s example and do not be afraid to pick winners. Invest public and private money in innovative sustainable technology.

Follow the example of successful countries, like the Scandinavian ones, instead of slavishly following States like the US and UK which are essentially failed States.
Accept that businesses that cannot pay the true costs of externalities. Like the real cost of labour, their use of the environment and their true costs to society are not sustainable and should be allowed to fail.
Adam Smith.

Regulate capital outflows and shift taxation to things like capital gains to encourage people who do useful things. Allow land prices to drop to where land use incomes cover the cost of capital. Making sustainable and ongoing income from land use more profitable than farming it for short term capital gain.

Follow Switzerland and make New Zealand’s Government arrangements
a democracy instead of a pretend one.
We should control our country, not, 122 self appointed incompetents, the OECD or IMF, or a bunch of failed idealisations from a few true believers in neo-liberalism.

Every country believes they are going to pay back debt by out exporting the others. Not possible.

Accept that taxes are the price of having an educated, housed and healthy labour force, adequate infrastructure, a local market, social cohesion and protection, protection from unprincipled competition and from crime and invasion.

Those who object to taxes are really just saying they want to free load off the rest of us as I doubt they would like having to provide all of the above privately.

People (usually claiming to be right wing) keep saying they want ideas from us on how we would do things differently. I suggest there has been plenty of ideas from the Greens and others. Many on these blogs. Some people just have not been listening.